Contents

Since Linus Torvalds developed the Linux kernel, there has been an explosion of distributions that can be categorized into several broad classes. The ecosystem is truly expansive.

There are hundreds of distributions out there, but each category has some that have become emblematic. Here’s a brief look at a few. My hope is that by showcasing some of these Linux standouts, you will appreciate what makes them special, and get inspired to take a deeper dive yourself.

Server

If you either work on a Linux desktop, or administer a Linux server, there might be times when frustration sets in over networking issues. Although Linux has made significant advances over the years, there are still instances where the standard troubleshooting or optimizations won’t work. To that end, you need to have some tricks and tips up your sleeve to make your life easier.

As an update to my original 10 quick tips to make Linux networking easier, I happen to have a few different tricks that I wanted to share with you. Hopefully one or more of these will assist you in either configuring, optimizing, or troubleshooting you Linux network woes.

We have 42 availability zones in 16 regions across the world today. There are three more coming up in China, France, and Sweden and we are far from being done expanding. In the fullness of time, we will be in every major business area across the world.

Kernel Space

After working for seven years at Tier 1 automotive suppliers that were members of the GENIVI project, Walt Miner, the Community Manager for the Linux Foundation’s Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) project understands the challenges of herding the car industry toward a common, open source computing standard. At the recent Embedded Linux Conference, Miner provided an AGL update and summarized AGL’s Yocto Project based Unified Code Base (UCB) for automotive infotainment, including the recent UCB 3.0 “Charming Chinook” release.

The debate over whether standards or open source will prevail is no longer the issue—instead a new white paper published by The Linux Foundation seeks to examine how they can live in harmony.

Put another way, “there’s a place for standards and there’s a place for open source, and the two of them can be the best of friends,” said Arpit Joshipura, the general manager of The Linux Foundation’s Networking & Orchestration department who was hired last year to help harmonize the open source networking ecosystem.

NVIDIA has released the 375.66 proprietary driver update as their latest in the long-lived driver series branch.

NVIDIA already has the 378 driver series for those wanting the latest bleeding-edge features and capabilities, but for those opting for a bit more stability / proven driver, the 375 series is their current “long-lived” branch.

Nvidia today released a new long-lived stable graphics driver for Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris operating systems, versioned 375.66, which adds support for some recently released GPUs and numerous improvements.

Among the newly supported graphics cards by the Nvidia 375.66 video driver, which is here to replace the Nvidia 375.26 driver that probably many of you are currently using on your distros, we can mention Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, Nvidia Quadro P3000, Nvidia Quadro M520, and Nvidia TITAN Xp for VR gaming.

This week I decided to pick up the Gigabyte Radeon RX 550 2GB graphics card for Linux testing at Phoronix, a $90 USD graphics card that was recently launched as part of the “Polaris Evolved” line-up. It’s not working on the upstream open-source code-base at the moment, but at least does function with the latest AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 driver for the RX 500 series.

Applications

The GStreamer project, through Sebastian Dröge, is pleased to announce today the immediate availability of the GStreamer 1.12.0 stable series of the open-source multimedia framework for GNU/Linux distributions.

GStreamer 1.12 is a massive release that introduces numerous new features and improvements, but the biggest of them all is support for Intel’s Media SDK (Software Development Kit) thanks to the implementation of a new msdk plugin to access the hardware-accelerated video decoding and encoding of various Intel GPUs on GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Today, the GStreamer community released version 1.12. This new release includes a number of exciting improvements, some of which I previewed two weeks ago. To see all the details about all the changes, you must read the well written release notes created by the community. Along with the usual load of memory leaks, crashes and other bugs, Collabora’s multimedia team once again contributed a number of improvements across a wide number of areas.

Now that the GStreamer 1.12 open-source multimedia framework has hit the stable channel, it’s time to have a look at some of the contributions made by various Collabora developers.

Collabora’s Olivier Crête writes today in a lengthy article that Collabora’s multimedia team managed once again to contribute lots of great improvements to the GStreamer open-source multimedia framework, whose 1.12 milestone is already on its way to the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution.

We all knows, most of the electronic devices are emitting blue light which will impact our sleep badly, that to on night (after dark) but many of the people are working in night and long time at computer which leads to face so many eye related problems. To reduce or prevent eye related issues, i will advise you to use Redshift, is a nifty tool to reduce computer eye strain on Linux.

Proprietary

Vivaldi kicked off the development of Vivaldi 1.10 just one day after releasing the 1.9 stable series, and snapshot 1.10.834.9 is the second in the development cycle, bringing the ability to sort downloads by size, name, address, date added, date finished (see the attached video for details), as well as support for setting a wallpaper as the Start Page background.

Games

Games are an interesting medium. Unlike just about every other popular form of entertainment, such as film, literature, and theatre, games depend on player choice. As a game designer, most of your time is spent crafting which choices to present to the player.

The most interesting question to us is: How can we take the lessons learned from game design and apply them to open source software design in general as well as to the communities that surround them? Games create systems through their rules in the same way that all software creates systems through their code and communities do through their processes and traditions.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

This tutorial guides you to install Kubuntu 17.04 operating system step-by-step. You’ll prepare a main partition, a swap partition, and do installation steps using a bootable USB drive. Kubuntu can be installed on PC and laptop, and this tutorial is applicable for both. It’s easy and I hope you’ll enjoy the beautiful Kubuntu 17.04 soon!

The May 2017 updates for my ‘ktown’ repository are fairly minimal, but anyway here it is: KDE 5_17.05.
This new release contains: KDE Frameworks 5.33.0, Plasma 5.9.5 and Applications 17.04.0. All of this is still built on top of Qt 5.7.1.

For the first time in the history of Kubuntu, the official Ubuntu Linux flavor built around the KDE desktop environment, the development team has prepared a so-called “wallpaper contest” event.

Following the example set by the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase movement, where a group of Ubuntu members led by Nathan Haines select some of the most beautiful wallpapers to be included in the next Ubuntu release, Kubuntu devs have also decided to do the same for the upcoming Kubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark).

The KDE e.V. community report for 2016 is now available. After the introductory statement from the Board, you can read a featured article about the 20th anniversary of KDE, and an overview of all developer sprints and conferences supported by KDE e.V. The report includes statements from our Working Groups, development highlights for 2016, and some information about the current structure of KDE e.V.

I recently participated in the GNOME / Rust “dev sprint” in Mexico City. (A thousand thanks to Federico and Joaquin for organizing!) While there I spent some time working on the gnome-class plugin. The goal of gnome-class was to make it easy to write GObject implementations in Rust which would fully interoperate with C code.

A while ago, GLib gained a new facility for ‘structured logging’. At the same time, it also gained support for writing logs to the systemd journal. Clearly, logging in GLib got a bit more complicated, and it can be a bit confusing.

Reviews

The Asus Tinker Board is a computer designed for Single Board Computer hobbyists, makers & Internet of things enthusiasts. One of the highlights of the device is its multimedia support; it’s a tremendous prospect for the multimedia enthusiast on a budget. The computer has a respectable 1.8GHz ARM Cortex-A17 quad-core processor. It’s only 32-bit (unlike the Raspberry Pi 3) but it has a higher clock speed. The Tinker Board also sports an integrated ARM-based Mali-T760 graphics processor (GPU). It’s available to purchase from Amazon (and other retailers), and currently priced at $59.99.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the May 2017 issue. With the exception of a brief period in 2009, The PCLinuxOS Magazine has been published on a monthly basis since September, 2006. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved. All articles may be freely reproduced via any and all means following first publication by The PCLinuxOS Magazine, provided that attribution to both The PCLinuxOS Magazine and the original author are maintained, and a link is provided to the originally published article.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

A total of seven openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots were released since last week’s update, which brought several minor version updates and less than a handful of major version updates.

A change on the server that prepares the .diff emails that are generated caused a hiccup for the Tumbleweed announcer, so snapshots 20170428, 20170429, 20170430 and 20170502 were all listed in snapshots 20170503. The change to the server was to create a similar data comparison file to generate emails for Leap 42.3, so it could list packages that are changed during its rolling development process.

Red Hat Family

While the original idea behind open-source software was to make licenses easier to share, it quickly developed into a new way of teaching individuals and organizations how to collaborate, forming common communities. Today, most innovation that occurs is happening via open-source communities.

“Now, [open source] is permeating almost every human endeavor to solve new challenges,” said Tim Yeaton, executive vice president of corporate marketing at Red Hat Inc.

Yesterday at Red Hat Summit, the company laid out its vision of the future, and it did so with hardly a mention of the word “Linux.” Instead, we heard about “the automated enterprise, powered by Ansible.”

Java Development Kit 9, the next edition of standard Java, had been proceeding toward its planned July 27 release after earlier bumps in the road over modularity. But now Red Hat and IBM have opposed the module plan. “JDK 9 might be held up by this,” Oracle’s Georges Saab, vice president of development for the Java platform, said late Wednesday afternoon. “As is the case for all major Java SE releases, feedback from the JCP [Java Community Process] may affect the timeline. Based on more than two years of feedback from weekly preview builds, we’re confident it meets the goals of the JSR [Java Specification Request] and the needs of developers.”

Debian Family

Derivatives

The development of the SparkyLinux 4.6 operating system continues based on the latest packages from the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” release, and the team is today announcing the immediate availability of the Release Candidate.

Just two weeks after the release of Devuan Jessie 1.0.0 RC, we are
happy to announce Devuan Jessie 1.0.0 RC2. Thanks to the very good
feedback received from the community, this release candidate is one
step closer to our final Devuan stable release and our first long term
support (LTS) release as well.

Devuan was created by self-described “Veteran Unix admins” who find Debian’s adoption of systemd abhorrent, because they want complete control over the packages that load when Linux boots. “Devuan decided to fork not only the base distribution, but also its governance,” the group writes, “because Debian has made it difficult to avoid systemd as init, entangling the system with unnecessary dependencies.”

Canonical’s Marco Ceppi announced the availability of the Kubernetes 1.6.2 open-source system for automating management, scaling, and deployment of containerized apps in the Canonical Distribution of Kubernetes.

Canonical, the driving force behind one of the world’s most popular free operating systems, Ubuntu Linux, has announced today that they are collaborating with NetApp on supplying unique Open Cloud Solutions based on Ubuntu OpenStack and NetApp.

By default, Ubuntu Server comes with the essential apps and service you need for your server, without apps like a browser, an office suite etc. After our post featuring the best Linux distros for gaming, and us being a hosting/server-related website, we got quite a few requests to publish a post about Linux (Ubuntu) server GUIs. So, here it is.

Hi guys, it’s been quite a long time since I last talked (rant) about random things while just having a relaxing day. Well, I will be ranting (i mean talking) today about some interesting stuff going on in Ubuntu world. So let’s just sit back, relax, get comfy and talk about recent changes and future changes in Ubuntu.

Google has long been focused on artificial intelligence. Its Google Now and voice assistance projects have used AI to better the lives of users. The Google Home voice-based hardware unit brings its assistant to life, making traditional inputs and displays unnecessary. With just the power of your voice, you can interact with the device — nothing else is needed.

The search giant has decided to take artificial intelligence to the maker community with a new initiative called AIY. This initiative (found here) will introduce open source AI projects to the public that makers can leverage in a simple way. Today, Google announces the first-ever AIY project. Called “Voice Kit,” it is designed to work with a Raspberry Pi to create a voice-based virtual assistant. Please keep in mind that the Pi itself is not included, so you must bring your own. For this project, you can use a Pi 3 Model B, Pi 2, or Pi Zero. Want a Voice Kit? Here’s how to get it. Heck, you might be getting one for free and you don’t even know it.

If you’re buying a PC or server, you’ve likely considered chips based on x86 or, perhaps less often, the ARM architecture.

But like Linux in software, an open-source chip project is out to break the dominance of proprietary chips offered by Intel, AMD, and ARM.

The RISC-V open-source architecture, created by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010, is open to all who want to use it. The RISC-V design can be modified for PCs, servers, smartphones, wearables, and other devices.

Advantech’s AIMB-242 is not a thin Mini-ITX board like the similarly 6th Gen Skylake-based AIMB-285, but it is billed as “industrial.” Advantech has already released a full-height Skylake Mini-ITX called the AIMB-275.

The KEYone, the latest in the BlackBerry Ltd/TCL collaboration, is a phone that returns to the Canadian brand’s iconic roots, for better or for worse. With Nougat and a strong focus on security, the KEYone is aimed at enterprise users and long-time fanatics.

Overall, the spec sheet for this phone is nothing chart-topping. The SoC is over a year old at this point and the screen has been downgraded from the year-and-a-half-old Priv’s, but using the KEYone was mostly a pleasant experience until after about a week with it. That was when I started experiencing rather noticeable slowdown and other problems.

When I look at the computers used by the enterprise open source people, I see a lot of Mac screens, with only a scattering of Linux and…. what’s that other operating system? Oh, right. Windows. Yep, It’s still out there, and there are people using it to develop enterprise-level open source applications.

And here’s question number two, which I’ll leave up to you to answer: Are Red Hat and The Linux Foundation doing the right thing by concentrating on Linux in the enterprise or are they abandoning their traditional user base and strongest supporters, a move that will spell eventual doom for them?

Web Browsers

Mozilla

While there have been Rust bindings and other Rust-Wayland projects in the past, they have ended up relying upon C language components. With a new project dubbed “Skylane”, there’s a full Wayland protocol implementation written within Rust.

SaaS/Back End

Mark Collier has been involved with OpenStack since the beginning, first at Rackspace where the project emerged as a joint partnership with NASA, and soon after as a co-founder and now Chief Operating Officer of the OpenStack Foundation.

I had the opportunity to speak with Mark a few weeks ago to hear more about what we can expect as OpenStack continues to evolve: from how it is developed, to what it can do, to how it is used. Here’s what he shared with me.

Dell’s acquisition of EMC may have jump-started the hardware titan’s enterprise cloud efforts, but it was open source development platforms that helped pave Dell’s path to customers in new markets, including telecommunications. Many of Dell’s customers were vocal about wanting some sort of open-source cloud platform on which to build those enterprise solutions, said Armughan Ahmad (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of solutions and alliances at Dell EMC.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

At the Red Hat Summit 2017, it was clear the open source business model is gaining ground, but in some unusual ways.

The premise of open source — software code that’s publicly shared for anyone to use — has been so successful that companies are now making it their own, but with a twist, said Steve O’Keefe, product line director for mobile at Red Hat Inc., based in Raleigh, N.C. Widely known as “inner source,” this copies the open source business model entirely, but only within the walls of the enterprise.

Every company wants faster and better software development, but many miss that the answer is right in front of them, said Andrew Aitken, general manager and global open source practice leader at Wipro Ltd., an IT systems integrator and consultancy based in India. “The idea is to give every developer access to every software repository in the company,” he explained.

Funding

Often the discussion around open source veers towards issues around quality control, but the discussion at the roundtable is clear that the issue with software of any kind is less around the software itself than the checks and balances put in place by the vendors concerned.

Lee comments that inside SUSE, there are rigourous checks and balances before any software makes it out the doors. This is backed up by Fischer, who comments that no CIO would allow software to be deployed without it meeting the required risk and compliance criteria.

BSD

We are happy to announce the release of pfSense® software version 2.3.4!

This is a maintenance release in the 2.3.x series, bringing stability and bug fixes, fixes for a few security issues, and a handful of new features. The full list of changes is on the 2.3.4 New Features and Changes page, including a list of FreeBSD and internal security advisories addressed by this release.

I spent some time improving the state of encyption on my domains (i.e. finally setting up https), and while I was at it, figured that I would switch from ssh+screen+irssi to Quassel. The FreeBSD packages for Quassel support SSL (TLS) by default, and there’s some brief instructions for setting that up as part of the pkg-message. However, I have a slightly different setup: for my in-house network, I have my own little root CA for my SSL certificates, and I wanted to use that. So for my quasselcore running on quassel.local.net, I wanted to have a certificate issued for that host, and used by quasselcore.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Just two days ago GCC 7.1 was released as the first stable release of GCC 7 as the annual update to this GNU code compiler. If you are looking for a Linux rolling-release distribution already using GCC 7 by default, Intel’s open-source Clear Linux appears to be one of the first.

Public Services/Government

Five years after the European Union adopted a policy designed to free public bodies in Europe from proprietary software, government authorities across Europe are deeply dependent on Microsoft software and services.

However, some government agencies have managed to migrate to open source alternatives. Their projects are often difficult, temporary, and, carried out under the radar, in an attempt to escape lobbying both from Microsoft and other parts of government.

Rome is one of Europe’s cities advocating open source as a better alternative to Microsoft. City councilor, Flavia Marzano, argues that open source should start on the desktop with open source alternatives to Microsoft Office.

Licensing/Legal

The District Court for the Northern District of California recently issued an opinion that is being hailed as a victory for open source software. In this case, the court denied a motion to dismiss a lawsuit alleging violation of an open source software license, paving the way for further action enforcing the conditions of the GNU General Public License (“GPL”).

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

The open data community got a surprising piece of news when the Trump Administration recently announced that it would no longer be supporting the Open.whitehouse.gov’s Open Data portal. (Open data is the idea that certain data should be freely viewable and usuable without controls.) Their argument is that the information is duplicative and is either already available online or will soon be made available elsewhere.

The administration also has no plans to continue the practice of making White House visitor logs available to the greater public, a procedure began by the Obama administration. Those records will be kept private for at least five years after Trump leaves office.

Health/Nutrition

Bangalore has a problem: It is running out of water, fast. Cities all over the world, from those in the American West to nearly every major Indian metropolis, have been struggling with drought and water deficits in recent years. But Banga­lore is an extreme case. Last summer, a professor from the Indian Institute of Science declared that the city will be unlivable by 2020. He later backed off his prediction of the exact time of death—but even so, says P. N. Ravindra, an official at the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board, “the projections are relatively correct. Our groundwater levels are approaching zero.”

Woodward argued that the defendants knew they were engaging in illegal activity, and did it anyway for years, starting as early as 2005. And they went to great lengths to cover up what they did, she said.

A group of civil society organisations and health experts have sent a letter to delegates to this month’s annual World Health Assembly urging support for a study on the delinkage of the costs of research and development from the prices of cancer medicines. Member states reportedly met on the issue today and are still undecided.

The World Health Organization announced today that it will launch a pilot project in 2017 for prequalifying cancer biosimilar medicines, with the intent of lowering prices on some of the most expensive cancer treatments.

Biosimilars are medicines very similar to the original biotherapeutics, which are pharmaceutical products derived from biological and living sources. They are often “speciality drugs,” highly effective in treating medical conditions for which no other treatments are available, in particular cancer, and chronic diseases such as diabetes. However those medicines are also highly priced, according to the WHO.

On Thursday, Republicans in the House of Representatives will attempt to force through a health care “reform” bill that is likely to leave millions of Americans without health insurance, especially those who suffer from chronic illnesses such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease. It has been estimated that if the Republican Party is successful in eliminating the Affordable Care Act that at least 43,000 Americans a year will die from lack of adequate health care.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated in March that 24 million people would lose health insurance if the AHCA were to pass, and the changes made to the bill in the ensuing two months have only made it less generous and more likely to jeopardize coverage. And because the bill substantially weakens regulations for both individual and employer plans, millions of people who still get insurance will see the extent of their coverage shrink, and see themselves forced to pay out of pocket for expensive procedures that would otherwise be covered.

Security

In Part 1 this series we asked, What is TLS/SSL? In this part in the series, we will be describing some of the TLS/SSL terminologies.

Before diving deeper into TLS, let’s first have a look at the very basics of SSL/TLS. Understanding the following will help you gain a better understanding of the topics discussed and analyzed later on.

For almost six years, Google knew about the exact technique that someone used to trick around one million people into giving away access to their Google accounts to hackers on Wednesday. Even more worrisome: other hackers might have known about this technique as well.

In fact, the number of malware attacks on Apple’s operating system skyrocketed by 744 percent in 2016. Despite this, most people still believe that Macs don’t get viruses. Add to this the fact that, despite the seeming ubiquity of Apple’s products, the company’s user base is still growing. There are nearly 100 million Apple users worldwide, myself included.

There has been some public discussion in the last week regarding the decision by Open Source Security Inc. and the creators of the Grsecurity® patches for the Linux kernel to cease making these patches freely available to users who are not paid subscribers to their service. While we at the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) would have preferred them to keep these patches freely available, the decision is absolutely theirs to make.

From the point of view of the CII, we would much rather have security capabilities such as those offered by Grsecurity® in the main upstream kernel rather than available as a patch that needs to be applied by the user. That said, we fully understand that there is a lot of work involved in upstreaming extensive patches such as these and we will not criticise the Grsecurity® team for not doing so. Instead we will continue to support work to make the kernel as secure as possible.

I suppose it had to come to this, perhaps the intersection of absurdity and unreality expressed through a video game as the only true way to capture the essence of America’s 15 year+ was in Afghanistan.

I must stress this is a real game. It is not satire or a joke. The game plays you in the role of supreme commander of everything U.S. in Afghanistan and requires you to democratize the country. You do this by bombing the sh*t out of stuff, meeting with elders, pulling out “intelligence” and reconstruction cards, and accomplishing tasks like bringing fresh water to some village to pull it away from Taliban control. There are also drones you control, lots of drones.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

In an interview with Newsweek publicizing her new film Risk—which concerns Julian Assange and WikiLeaks—Laura Poitras explained that after opening the documentary at the Cannes Film Festival last year, she had re-edited it to look at the “culture of sexism that exists not only within the hacker community but in other communities.”

Although I am a member of Assange’s legal team, Poitras’ lawyers declined to permit any of us to view the reviewed version of the film, so I cannot comment on whether she accomplished her aims.

Today, May 5th 2017, WikiLeaks publishes “Archimedes”, a tool used by the CIA to attack a computer inside a Local Area Network (LAN), usually used in offices. It allows the re-directing of traffic from the target computer inside the LAN through a computer infected with this malware and controlled by the CIA. This technique is used by the CIA to redirect the target’s computers web browser to an exploitation server while appearing as a normal browsing session.

Finance

Thousands of people in Flint are at risk of losing their homes to foreclosure if they don’t pay up on their water bills. After recently putting out shut-off notices the city is now back to threatening tax liens on people’s homes.

“I got scared, for probably the first time since this all started this actually scared me,” said Melissa Mays, who is a mother and water activist who lives in Flint.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

So what will bring about the end of neoliberalism—the left? the right? the incompetence of the professional political class?—and, when it’s gone, what will replace it? We asked five of our favorite minds for their views on the direction we urgently need to go next.

President Trump invited Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to the White House. Besides the fact that Duterte is known for unleashing a campaign of extrajudicial killings of drug traffickers and users, he also named the Trump Organization’s partner in its Manila real-estate property his top trade envoy.

Theresa May’s breathtaking claim that the EU is interfering in the general election has moved the Brexit negotiations to a whole new level of confrontation. Those who think that international negotiations on future trade relations are best conducted in an atmosphere of extreme mutual hostility, are nonsensical.

Good deals come from good relationships.

It is also extraordinary that May appears to be staking out her appeal exclusively on UKIP territory. I am quite sure she is following her own, natural, very right wing instincts. But by taking this aggressively right wing position, she is opening up a flank to the Liberal Democrats and severely endangering her prospects in Scotland, where UKIP never achieved anything like the traction it did in England. She also seems to be calculating that the ordinary Brexit voters take an extreme view and would welcome an absolute dust-up with the EU, irrespective of its long term effects on the UK.

[...]

Finally, she claims that all this has been timed to affect the result of the general election. That is the weirdest claim of all.

The Downing St dinner at which May made a fool of herself was an initiative by May. She issued the invitation and she dictated the timing. It was not vicious foreign enemies who are all out to get her. She may be forgiven for being aggrieved that the poor opinions of her were leaked to the press. But anyone who knows anything about the EU knows that everything leaks, all the time. In general it is a very open institution. The Commission has in any case to report progress in the negotiations regularly to the European Parliament.

It hasn’t been a good 100 days for the U.S. Department of State. Like the musical Hamilton’s orphaned title character, called out in song for being a “Founding Father without a father,” State is now something of an agency without agency.

Not much of substance seems to be happening at Foggy Bottom. America’s top-level foreign policy tasks remain, but someone else – Jared Kushner? H.R. McMaster? – is tending to many of them. The bad news includes President Donald Trump’s hope of slashing State’s budget, with no sign of objection from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Half the positions in the agency’s organizational chart are vacant or occupied by acting officials.

Censorship/Free Speech

The New York Times took a piece I wrote strongly defending the right to free speech, the raw concept of unfettered speech from a content-neutral position, and called it Right Partisan Writing You Shouldn’t Miss, intended as a compliment.

What I wrote was directly in line with the absolutist view of free speech and the First Amendment I have always taken: let them speak. Except for the very narrow and specific restrictions on speech defined over the years by the Supreme Court, let them speak. Let good ideas whoop bad ideas. Look for ways to allow more speech, not loopholes that might let an institution get away with silencing a speaker. It is as much of a philosophical argument as a legal one.

A journalism adviser at a Kansas community college has been suspended from his job, and student reporters there believe the administration is targeting them after they published multiple unflattering pieces.

Alan Montgomery, adviser to the Hutchinson Community College student newspaper, The Hutchinson Collegian, said he was informed of his suspension Friday, with his courses being canceled before the semester’s end.

Privacy/Surveillance

The UK government has secretly drawn up more details of its new bulk surveillance powers – awarding itself the ability to monitor Brits’ live communications, and insert encryption backdoors by the backdoor.

In its draft technical capability notices paper [PDF], all communications companies – including phone networks and ISPs – will be obliged to provide real-time access to the full content of any named individual within one working day, as well as any “secondary data” relating to that person.

That includes encrypted content – which means that UK organizations will not be allowed to introduce true end-to-end encryption of their users’ data but will be legally required to introduce a backdoor to their systems so the authorities can read any and all communications.

In addition, comms providers will be required to make bulk surveillance possible by introducing systems that can provide real-time interception of 1 in 10,000 of its customers. Or in other words, the UK government will be able to simultaneously spy on 6,500 folks in Blighty at any given moment.

Civil Rights/Policing

The US Department of Justice has begun a criminal investigation into Uber’s use of a software tool that helped its drivers evade local transportation regulators, two sources familiar with the situation said.

Federal authorities have begun a criminal investigation into Uber’s use of Greyball, a software tool that the company used to evade local officials in places where the service had not been formally approved, which notably includes Portland, Oregon. This is according to Reuters, which cited two unnamed sources in its Thursday evening report.

Uber received a subpoena from a Northern California grand jury seeking documents concerning how the software tool functioned and where it was deployed, one person familiar with the request said. That indicates a criminal investigation is underway. The second source confirmed that was the case.

Let’s Encrypt launched April 12, 2016 with the intent to support and encourage sites to enable HTTPS everywhere (sometimes referred to as SSL everywhere even though the web is steadily moving toward TLS as the preferred protocol). As of the end of February 2017, EFF (who launched the effort) estimates that half the web is now encrypted. Now certainly not all of that is attributable to EFF and Let’s Encrypt. After all, I have data from well before that date that indicates a majority of F5 customers enabled HTTPS on client-facing services, in the 70% range. So clearly folks were supporting HTTPS before EFF launched its efforts, but given the significant number of certificates* it has issued the effort is not without measurable success.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

Kodi is an open source media player program that started life as XBMC (Xbox Media Center). Today, running on a variety of devices, it provides a friendly interface to play video and audio content, whether from static files, torrents, or a live stream.

New data published by Canadian broadband management company Sandvine reveals that close to 9 percent of all North American households have at least one Kodi device. Roughly two thirds of these actively use pirate add-ons, which is good for millions of families in total.

Benefiting from a feature of Finnish copyright law that has been in place since 2006,

the firms are able to find out the identities of internet users that are suspected of violating copyright laws by filing a petition with the Market Court of Finland. If the petition is granted, internet service providers are compelled to give up the relevant contact details. According to the Ministry of Education and Culture, almost 100,000 such petitions have been submitted in the last 11 years.

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What Else is New

The latest tactics of the patent microcosm are just about as distasteful as last month's (or last year's), with focus shifting to the courts and few broadly-misinterpreted patent cases (mainly Finjan, Berkheimer, and Aatrix)

The fightback against Section 101 and the US Supreme Court (notably Alice) seems to concentrate on old and new buzzwords, such as "Software as a Medical Device" ("SaMD") or "Fourth Industrial Revolution" ("4IR"), which the EPO recently paid European media to spread and promote

Infomercials are still dominant among news about patents, in effect drowning out the signal (real journalism) and instead pushing agenda that is detached from reality, pertinent facts, objective assessment, public interest and so on

A discussion about the infamous abundance of patent cases in the Eastern District of Texas (TXED/EDTX) and what this will mean for businesses that have branches or any form of operations there (making them subjected to lawsuits in that district even after TC Heartland)

The patent microcosm is so eager to stop the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that it's supporting sham deals (or "scams") and exploits/distorts the voice of the new USPTO Director to come up with PTAB-hostile catchphrases

Judgmental patent maximalists are still respecting high courts only when it suits them; whenever the outcome is not desirable they're willing to attack the legitimacy of the courts and the competence of judges, even resorting to racist ad hominem attacks if necessary

With or without the Unified Patent Court (UPC), which is the wet dream of patent trolls and their legal representatives, the EPO's terrible policies have landed a lot of low-quality patents on the hands of patent trolls (many of which operate through city-states that exist for tax evasion -- a fiscal environment ripe for shells)

The money-obsessed, money-printing patent office, where the assembly line mentality has been adopted and patent-printing management is in charge, is devaluing or diluting the pool of European Patents, more so with restrictions (monetary barriers) to challenging bad patents

he media in Europe continues to be largely apathetic towards the EPO crisis, instead relaying a bunch of press releases and doctored figures from the EPO; only blogs that closely follow EPO scandals bothered mentioning the new petition

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) sees the number of filings up to an almost all-time high and efforts to undermine PTAB are failing pretty badly -- a trend which will be further cemented quite soon when the US Supreme Court (quite likely) backs the processes of PTAB

The EPO is trying very hard to silence not only the union but also staff representatives; it's evidently worried that the lies told by Team Battistelli will be refuted and morale be affected by reality